Robert Frost Essay, Research Paper
Through his poetry, Robert Frost gave the world a window to view the world. He give us poems that define hope and happiness to poems of profound gloom, but no matter the mood all of Robert Frost s poems explain the nature of living.
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. His father was William Frost, a Harvard graduate who was on his way westward when he stopped to teach at Bucknell Academy in Pennsylvania for extra money. His mother, Isabelle Moodie began teaching math at Bucknell while William was there, and they got married and moved to San Francisco. About a year after moving to San Francisco, they had Robert. They named him Robert Lee Frost, after William’s childhood hero, Robert E. Lee. Frost’s father died from tuberculosis at age thirty-four, in 1885. Isabelle took Robert and his sister back east to Massachusetts. He soon learned to love language, and eventually went to Lawrence High School, where he wrote the words to the school hymn, and graduated as co-valedictorian. Frost read of Dickens, Tennyson, Longfellow, and many others. Frost was then sent to Dartmouth College by his controlling grandfather, who saw it as the proper place for him to train to become a businessman. Frost read even more in college, and learned that he loved poetry. When in 1894 he received $15 for publishing a poem, he asks his future wife to marry him and agreed. Robert frost had many children, but a few died and this inspired him to write a short one-act play. Throughout his life his family and friend inspire him to write. He was the first man to win the Pulitzer Prize four times. Throughout his writing career he received nineteen honorary degrees from various collages. And then he died on January 29, 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts. His epitaph reads: “I had a lover s quarrel with the world.”
His poetry had little success getting published, and he had to work various jobs to make a living, such as a shoemaker, a country schoolteacher, and a farmer. In 1912 Frost gave up his teaching job, sold his farm, and moved to England. He received aid from poets such as Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, and published his first two volumes of poetry, A Boy’s Will in 1913, and North of Boston in 1914. These works were well received not only in England, but also in America. Frost returned to America in 1915 and continued writing his poetry. He produced many volumes of poetry, among which are Mountain Interval (1916), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), A Masque of Reason (1945), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. He became the first poet to read a poem at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy. His poetry was based mainly on life and scenery in rural New England, and reflected many values of American society.
Frost also uses fairly simple words in his poetry, which makes it easy for the reader to understand, while making it sound no less elegant. The diction relates directly to the subject of his poems, because the farm workers and ordinary men do not think or speak with complex words, but, like Frost, they use simple words to make a complex statement. One could say that Frosts words are like simple colors that when combined, they form a beautiful rainbow. And this rainbow will drape for as long as his words are remembered.